What I'm Reading

Answers

When it comes to global warming, one of the most idiotic talking points in the right-wing's arsenal is if the ice caps are melting on Mars, Earth's warming trend couldn't possibly be caused by humans. As with anything cons say, the exact opposite is true. The bfacts is that the bizarre weather conditions seen on Mars and other planets are undeniable proof that the ecological destruction Bush has wrought on our own world is spreading like a virus to others in our solar system.

If Earth truly has a fever as the prophet Al Gore says, then Mars has a severe runny nose. Neptune has a persistent cough. Mercury has the clap - probably something it picked up from that slut, Venus. Jupiter has herpes. Saturn has ringworm. Pluto isn't considered a planet any more and is probably just feeling a little depressed. Uranus, of course, has cysts.

Al Gore has been deeply troubled about Uranus for some time, but he's never been able to put his finger on it. Frankly, there are some in Congress who would prefer he keep his nose out of Uranus completely. But if Uranus has cysts, you don't bicker over ointments. You take it to the doctor, and the first name that comes up in any discussion about Uranus is Al Gore. In fact, Al Gore quite possibly knows more about Uranus than your anus knows about Uranus or, for that matter, what Uranus knows about you. He's certainly more of an authority on Uranus than Rush Limbaugh, who weaseled out of the illegal and immoral war in Vietnam for reasons that I would rather not delve into.

Environmental Prophet Al Gore warned a stunned Congress today of the dire consequences should we puny humans refuse to obey him. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Earthquakes. Plagues of locusts. Disoriented manatees. Cats and dogs living together. The deliberate and systematic destruction of all life on Arrakis. Terrifying, indeed – but just a taste of what’s in store for us all should we continue to blatantly defy Gore.
The time has come to cleanse ourselves of our capitalistic sins and save the earth from total obliteration - but it won’t be easy. Preserving the future for our children will involve tough choices and personal sacrifice. Most importantly it will require tax increases, wealth restribution, government control of production, and the abandonment of the free market system – by pure coincidence, the exact same things liberal democrats have been calling for since before global warming was ever an issue. It would be sheer madness, then, for Repugs to continue to stand against such bold initiatives now that the scientific consensus is that we're all going to die unless we do exactly as Al Gore says.
So there's really no point in debating it any further.

Feted at Sundance. Fellated at the Oscars. There may even be a Nobel Prize in his future. After having his election and subsequent re-election stolen from him, it appears that Al Gore is finally getting the respect he deserves – and not just from the lesbian community. The whole world is united in love and admiration for the man who would awaken us to an inconvenient truth and save us from our own polluting selves.

There are, as expected, the typical right-wing bullies on the beach who can’t resist kicking sand in Al’s face as he basks in the glow of his much-deserved stardom. Always the turds in the proverbial punchbowl, these smearmongers have procured “evidence” that Gore uses twenty times more electricity than your average American household. Well, of course he does – he’s twenty times more important than your average American. What the GOP attack machine neglects to factor into their hate-fueled orgy of hate is the utter itsy-bitsyness of Gore’s teensy weensy “carbon footprint” – ithat is, the amount of damage one does to the environment simply by cursing this planet with their existence.

Naturally, Al Gore’s carbon footprint is drastically smaller than that of a carbon-based lifeform. This allows him to enjoy the sort of lavish lifestyle that only a progressive celebrity truly deserves. There is also the matter of "carbon offsets" to consider - special “Eco-Credits” we can use to offset the amount of Carbon Debt we incur throughout our daily lives. The more environmentally-friendly you are, the more credits you obtain. Voting Democrat, for instance, earns you an automatic 1000 Eco-Credits. Wearing earth tones gets you another 5,000 Eco-Credits. Having at least one Prius in your 17-car garage is worth 20,000 Eco-Credits, and an additional 10,000 if you slap a Greenpeace bumper sticker on it. For those who can't afford a hybrid vehicle, abortions an inexpensive way to nab an easy 10,000 credits. Once you have accumulated enough Eco-Credits, you can exchange them for the privilege of heating your home, driving your car, or flushing your toilet.

Unfortunately, there are only so many Eco-Credits to go around, and Al Gore has most of them. His tireless devotion to scaring the crap out of people has earned him enough Eco-Credits that he could raise a herd of bean-fed bovines in his front yard and still have enough left over to heat his indoor olympic swimming pool for the next 1000 years if he wanted to. Instead, Gore has chosen to hold his vast wealth of Eco-Credits in trust for the America people, until such a time that Mother Earth has passed safely from the under shadow of an environmental holocaust. Until that day comes, it is important that the rest of us reduce our carbon footprints by shutting off our heat, turning off our lights, and eating cold dog food directly from the can.

Courageous House Democrats took on the sinister entity known as “Big Oil” yesterday, and vowed to bring down any other industries with the word “Big” in their name as well. Big Pharmaceuticals, Big Tobacco, Big Cheese – any corporation that makes profits at the expense of the people and fails to dump those profits into the People’s Party will now be held accountable.

“Big Oil made record profits in 2007,” revealed a disgusted House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. It's a sure sign that a business is doing something corrupt, and Bush has consistently turned a blind eye to such skullduggery. Democrats, on the other hand, are determined to put an end to it. As part of their “First 100 Hours” agenda, they voted to roll back a series of Bush-era provisions that essentially subsidized Big Oil by failing to tax it out of existence. Goddess only knows how many other businesses have been exploiting that very same loophole and stealing from that federal cookie jar on Bush’s watch.

The bold new legislation will certainly be vetoed by the pro-business Shrub, but a defiant Nancy Pelosi has vowed to stand in front of a red, white, and blue “A New Direction for America” sign until Big Oil is made to pay for every last dime it has stolen from The People.

AWOL, draft-dodging, chickenhawk Bush cowered inside a taxpayer-funded armored car as tornados swept through Central Texas today. He was no doubt oblivious to the irony, or what “irony” even means for that matter.

It goes without saying that severe weather is caused primarily by Bush’s refusal to ratify Kyoto, but for the tornados to touch down in the home of his Enron, Halliburton, and Big Oil masters is poetic justice at its finest. Yet almost as if someone flicked a switch from their comfy armored car, the storm conventiently passed and neither Dumbya nor any of his staff were hurt.

On the bright side, Camp Casey was totally spared! Reports of a “horrendous sucking sound” raised initial concerns that a twister was approaching, but the fears were alleviated when it turned out that Mother Cindy had simply retired to her trailer with Hugo Chavez. It took her unbelievable courage to do so, for trailers are known tornado magnets, and will continue to be as long as Bush's FEMA insists on building mobile home parks in tornado zones.

The killer winds that hammered the Greater Puget Sound area last week uprooted trees, knocked down power lines, and left millions without electricity. As of this morning, power has regretfully been restored to the better part of Seattle, and the blame lies squarely on the energy companies that put the selfish needs of humans above the preservation of our fragile ecosystem.

While thousands stampede to the newly reopened shopping malls in a last minute orgy of holiday consumerism, there will be no Kwaanza for the countless numbers of endangered salmon that are puréed in giant hydrolelectric turbines just so Bush’s Big Enron Buddies can line their pockets with blood money. And let’s not forget the lumber companies that will profit as fallen trees are cruelly removed from their final resting places and dragged off to pulp mills - or butchered like sides of beef and stashed inside the homes of wealthy upper-class families who can afford actual fireplaces.

Others aren’t so lucky, or so White. In fact, Bush’s wind storm appeared to have a Katrina-esque way of conveniently targeting minorities. The majority of those who were killed or hospitalized due to carbon monoxide poisoning were non-English speaking immigrants, hailing from poverty-stricken Third World countries where common sense is a luxury most cannot afford.

It seems that Bush's anti-immigration policies have taken a turn for the farcical, as has my life. My building is still without power, so I've been doing what little blogging I can from Jimmy Wong’s Sushi Bar & Internet Café - and although Jimmy makes the best damn Salmon Rolls in Seattle, the place reeks like the back end of Grandma’s ’59 Edsel.

Watching the TV news last weekend, it was hard not to be sickened by all the acts of sadistic cruelty performed in the name of a supposedly peaceful religion. Even more so when one realizes that these Abu-Ghraibesque atrocities were being committed right here on American soil, against our own children, and within the once-sacred confines of the People’s House.

While the nation watched helplessly Sunday, hundreds of innocent toddlers were herded like cattle into an enclosed area and forced to collect brightly painted chicken embryos in a bizarre ritual to appease Bush’s angry consumerist Man-God.

Senseless? Yes. Barbaric? Rooty patootie. But forget for a moment the inhuman conditions that thousands of chickens are forced to endure at egg farms across the country. Put aside your gut-wrenching horror over the millions of unborn baby chickens who are never given a chance at life, hard-boiled inside their colorful shells by a peeResident who wouldn’t fund embryonic stem cell research to save Christopher Reeve’s life. With it’s emphasis on competition and the hoarding of natural resources, the traditional White House Easter Egg Hunt is less a homophobic neo-Nazi rally than an exercise in capitalist greed.

Isn’t it about time that we as a society abandon this primitive ritual in favor of a more community-oriented and earth-friendly alternative? I have the fondest memories of my mother’s annual Fungus Hunts. Every fall, the familiar sounds of Jefferson Airplane floating out of Mother’s van would be the signal for all the children of the neighborhood to go forth into the woods and gather mushrooms. No chickens were harmed. No children were emotionally scarred by an authoritarian male Easter Bunny. Instead, Mother would provide the kids with positive reinforcement by paying them a penny for every mushroom they collected, and a dollar if they stumbled upon one of the many plastic baggies of herbal glaucoma medication she stashed about the yard. The grand total was held in trust until the end of the day, when she would award it not to the child who found the most mushrooms, but to the one she deemed most needy. Although my bad back prevented me from joining in on the fun, the extra cash in my pocket went a long way towards lifting my spirits. At least, until I got the stuffing kicked out of me by the fascist neo-con larvae that were unappreciative of Mother’s valuable lesson about sharing with others.

And isn’t that what Easter is really all about? Sharing? Or is it Christmas? Whatever. Judging by the selfish, consumerist Götterdämmerung at the White House yesterday, it’s a lesson that so-called Christians seem to have forgotten.

This year, thousands of hunters will storm the Canadian ice sheets in a bloodthirsty orgy of death, brutally murdering countless baby fur seals and trampling over the last few remaining Beatles in the process. After being bludgeoned with rusty tire irons and skinned alive, they will then be left to die on the ice as their coveted pelts are shipped off to U.S. auto makers and made into SUV seat covers. The fate of the seals is often much worse.

Yet Bush does nothing.

Never before has the hypocrisy of the Christian right been so blaringly obvious. The supposedly “pro-life” Shrub will enthusiastically subsidize the vicious slaughter of fuzzy, helpless, yet incredibly talented musicians, but he will deny a woman her constitutional Right to Choose simply to protect the “life” of an unborn fetus nowhere near as cute and cuddly as a baby fur seal. Indeed, it’s hard to find anything loveable about a lifeless lump of goo that just sits around for nine months, slowly sapping away a woman’s precious life energy. Yet Ringo has grown on us nonetheless, and he’s a damn good drummer, too. A human fetus, on the other hand, serves only to hinder a young woman’s career and severely ruin her ability to party. One look from a baby fur seal’s big brown eyes will make the same woman feel all gooey inside in ways that John Edwards never could, despite what all the focus groups led us to believe.

Since the dawn of time, philosophers have debated the exact moment that life begins. Some say it begins at conception. Others believe it was when Sgt. Pepper was released. But I am sure that we as a society can agree that “cuteness” is a major factor in determining whether something deserves to live or die, just as the amount of Grammies and platinum records a person has is an indicator of how important their opinion is. Christian fundamentalists can go right on living in their magical mystery world where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies, but until an unborn fetus sprouts fuzzy little flippers and springs out of the womb singing “I Am the Walrus”, the decision must be between the mother and her conscience.

It was a morning like any other in the tiny burgh of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The overpowering stench of wet cigarettes and cow flatulence filled the salty sea air. Small children giggled with delight as they frolicked around the smoldering remains of last night’s cross burning. From the nearby cotton fields, the faint crack of horsewhips could be heard over the drunken whoops of hooded Klansmen.

At the town’s makeshift college, slack-jawed students gathered in the campus community area known as “The Pit”, perhaps to arrange dates with their sisters to the evening’s barn dance, or maybe to cram for the big exam in Tobaccy Chewin’ 101. Little did they know an insidious enemy lurked amongst them, secretly plotting their destruction, patiently waiting for the right moment to strike. It was an enemy allowed to roam freely within our borders for years, welcomed and even embraced by those sworn to protect us. Yet no amount of duct tape or visqueen could prepare the nine hapless Tar Heels for the two-tons of cold metal death that would rampage through their school like Dick Clark through Columbine High, scattering hogs, chickens, and empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon to the four winds.

The terrifying evil of SUV’s is nothing new. A Jeep Cherokee killed ten people in Glendale last year. Another was responsible for the death of an elderly man in Miami just two days ago. An SUV was even witnessed at the scene of one of the many church fires that have been plaguing Alabama the past few months. The news of SUV-caused deaths has become so commonplace that the media no longer reports it, this latest incident being no exception. But the threat these oversized vehicles pose to pedestrians is enough to raise even the most pro-SUV eyebrow. When plowed into a crowd of people, a sports utility vehicle is ten times more likely than a passenger car to kill someone, and will do so far less fuel efficiently. In most cases, the Republican driver of the vehicle will walk away from the accident unscathed. The nine young men, women, and transgendered UNC students struck down that day weren’t as lucky, and will face years of reconstructive surgery and emotional therapy before the atmosphere burns off and the ice caps melt, killing them all anyway.

Yet Bush does nothing.

The romantic “terrorist” label has been recklessly bandied about the right-wing blogosphere, yet no abortion clinic was targeted and the SUV was rented, not purchased. Since the man behind the wheel was not a white Christian male, there is little need for the FBI to investigate a “hate crime”, either. Indeed, the whole thing seems like a tragic misunderstanding on the part of the driver, and any further speculation about his motives would only be divisive in time when the Magical Healing Powers of Unity are needed most. However, I would hope that the families of those injured in the accident pursue civil action against both Chrysler and the Bush administration for criminal negligence. Perhaps a hard hit to their bankbooks will force them reconsider unleashing any more dangerous vehicles onto our streets.

Hurricane Katrina. Domestic wiretapping, Phony terrorism alerts. The 9/11 terrorist attacks themselves. But of all the cruel jokes Bush has played on the American people, nothing compares to his recent promise to end their addiction to fossil fuels. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that like letting your local crack dealer run the rehab clinic? The Chimp actually said it with a straight face, though, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only progressive who was baffled by his sudden environmental enlightenment.

“Roof makers will one day be able to make a solar roof that protects you from the elements and at the same time, powers your house," Bush told reporters in Michigan yesterday. "The vision is this: that technology will become so efficient that you'll become a little power generator in your home, and if you don't use the energy you generate you'll be able to feed it back into the electricity grid."

So let me get this straight. Bush wants me to spend $15,000 of my own money installing solar panels on my roof, and then sell whatever I don’t use back to the city so his Big Sunshine Buddies can gouge my neighbors on a rainy day? No wonder the Shrub is suddenly so jolly about solar power. His plan would effectively create ten of thousands of miniature Mom & Pop Enrons, all screwing their neighbors for an extra buck and pouring their ill-begotten loot right back into the RNC.

Just like water, air, real estate, and personal income, sunlight is a natural resource that belongs to everyone. It shouldn’t be hoarded like cats in Grandma's trailer, but held in trust by community leaders and distributed to each person according to his need. Obviously, Bush doesn’t have any concern for the energy requirements of people who live under bridges or in sewer systems where the sun does not reach. Nor does he care how unfair solar power is to parts of the world that aren’t blessed by constant sunshine. Will Bush do the right thing and cut back U.S. energy production so Germany, France and other sunless locales can compete with us in the global marketplace? What of states that are heavily dependent on aggressive gas taxes to create pointless union jobs? Will there be federal assistance available for the thousands of impoverished contractors who will be forced to sell one of their Harleys just to put food on the table?

There are bound to be severe environmental ramifications to solar power as well. One or two rooftop solar kits are just the beginning. Endless fields of solar panels soaking up the sun’s rays like giant sponges will cast the world into a dark age unseen since Reagan was elected. Animal species and plant life that depend on their meager share of sunlight to survive will be threatened with extinction. Crops will fail. Millions will starve. Ted Kennedy's days of nude sunbathing will be over. Do you want to live in that world? I sure don't.

As much as I like the idea of weaning Americans off its addiction to petroleum, Bush’s plan has more holes than the golf course he was goofing around on while 10,000 poor Blacks drowned in New Orleans. What he fails to understand is that the problem is deeply rooted in our culture, and can only be corrected through the relentless and merciless taxation of all drivers until they have no choice but to give up their selfish love affair with the automobile forever.